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From foe to friend U.S.-Russia ties on the mend
By Jon Boyle
MOSCOW, Nov 8 (Reuters) - Cold Wars, proxy wars, rhetorical blows and ideological foes: after decades of diplomatic trench warfare, Moscow and Washington are now on the cusp of a new partnership forged in the crucible of the war on terrorism.
For President Vladimir Putin's support for President George W. Bush and his war on those behind the deadly September attacks on U.S. landmarks has triggered talk of a sea-change in their relations.
Their summit next week at Bush's Texas ranch could see the two men narrow differences on arms control and trade issues as they move ever closer in the fight against terrorism.
The new warmth carries echoes of the fraternity born of the titanic struggle to defeat Nazi Germany, although that was later smothered by the "Iron Curtain" that divided post-war Europe.
By 1948 the Cold War was in full swing: the Berlin Blockade was followed the next year by the detonation of the first Soviet atomic bomb. And so the nuclear arms race was born.
Tensions rose throughout the 1950s, prompting U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower to recommend the use of U.S. forces to protect Middle East states against Communist aggression.
His September 1959 meeting in the United States with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev launched modern-day summitry, but the glimmer of hope for improved ties was downed along with Gary Power's U-2 spy plane in 1960.
Soon Khrushchev was angrily banging his shoe on the table at the United Nations, and his June 1961 summit in Vienna with new U.S. President John F. Kennedy was an exercise in futility. That August, Soviet-backed East Germany built the Berlin Wall.
In 1961 relations reached their nadir in the Cuban Missile Crisis, a dash to the brink of nuclear war defused, despite the public posturing, by an old-fashioned diplomatic backroom deal.
FROM PRAGUE SPRING TO DETENTE
While U.S. forces were bogged down in Vietnam, Soviet forces rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush the "Prague Spring" reform movement. It took Richard Nixon's arrival at the White House to give the diplomatic lexicon a new word: detente.
The SALT 1 and ABM arms control treaties he signed with Leonid Brezhnev helped get summitry back on track, with the Soviet leader at times in the driving seat -- and on one occasion quite literally.
At their 1973 Camp David meeting, Nixon gave Brezhnev a dark-blue Lincoln Continental, knowing the Soviet leader's taste for fast cars. Brezhnev motioned Nixon into the passenger's seat, and sped off down a one-lane road towards a sharp turn.
"I reached over and said, 'Slow down, slow down', but he paid no attention," Nixon said. Brezhnev finally slammed on the brakes, made the turn and commented later, "This is a very fine automobile. It holds the road very well."
The following year in Moscow they agreed to limit underground nuclear tests. An era of detente blossomed, overshadowed only by the Jackson-Vanik amendment that curbed trade over Moscow's refusal to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate.
AFGHANISTAN HURDLE
The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan prompted a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics and a new chill in ties.
New White House tenant Ronald Reagan was a fire and brimstone anti-Communist who wanted to build a missile shield to protect the United States from the "Evil Empire."
Only after five years in office did he finally meet youthful Soviet newcomer Mikhail Gorbachev. But the personal chemistry that emerged from their 1985 summit resulted in the most sweeping arms control accords in history.
In 1990, Gorbachev and Reagan's successor, George Bush, made a show of unity over the incipient Gulf crisis, the zenith in a fleeting "golden age" of superpower cooperation.
The 1990s ushered in the Bill and Boris show of Clinton and Yeltsin, whose bear-hugging, backslapping antics belied deep divisions over missile defence, NATO expansion eastwards and Russia's decline from superpower to economic basket case.
With the arrival of George W. Bush in the White House many feared a "mini-Cold War," as a rash of spy scandals further hurt ties soured by his plans for a new missile defence system and criticism of Russia's crackdown in rebel Chechnya.
But in June, during their debut meeting in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana, Bush said he had looked into the "soul" of Putin and found a man with whom he could do business.
Putin's staunch support for Bush's war on terrorism in the wake of the September 11 hijacked airliner attacks on the United States could mark a watershed in relations.
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